How Shopify Rages Against Meetings | Kaz Nejatian (COO Shopify)

no one literally no one said I want to grow up and sit in meetings all day long and no one came to Shopify to sit in meetings people came here to and help entrepreneurs succeed help Founders and it just so happens to like do really good work as a builder you need Focus time and meeting time are opposite things from each other if you need uninterrupted Focus time and if your entire day is peppered by half hour meetings here and there you just can't ever get going um it's like imagine if vano had to paint while perpetually interrupted by someone every 20 minutes today my guest is K Nan Chief Operating Officer at Shopify K and I spoke about why traditional career ladders are broken why strategy is the least important part of building products and why Shopify cancelled all recurring meetings I think this interview will feel like therapy if you ever worked at Big tech companies be sure to like And subscribe for more interviews like this now let's dive in all right guys I'm super excited to talk to you today I think I haven't worked at Shopify myself right but I really liked the post that Toby wrote about Shopify being a craft Centric company just curious like what's the difference between crafters and managers to you yeah look actually an

interesting thing because the main difference is about what is your primary job like what is the thing you spend most of your job doing right there's a famous hologram essay called Builder time and manager time and I things kind of gets to the same idea which is when you are at work what is the most important thing you do what's the most of your time spent on doing and most people want their primary job to be building right to actually be building things and unfortunately most companies aren't built for those people who want to spend most of their time building most companies are built for people who want to spend most of their time managing could a very weird incentive in companies because the people who build companies are managers they're optimized for the wrong thing so our job at Shopify is to make this place a crafter's paradigm to clear the obstacle from Crafters so they can do their best work and can be rewarded for doing that work yeah that's amazing I think a lot of product people Engineers they actually really love the craft but you know I've worked at many different companies and if you look at the job ladders of some of these companies it's always like oh you want to become director you got to manage like five people or like you got to grow your head count right so how do you kind of like celebrate the crafter or like the IC or like you know just like down yeah traditional job

ladders that essentially everyone stole from the Army Post World War II are just totally broken they're just broken right like you understand why in the Army you wouldn't want a general that has no direct reports that would make no sense in an army but most things aren't the Army right so one of the things you've done is you actually completely bated job levels at Shopify so there's a manag track and a crafter track and they both go up to same levels they both go down to same level and up to same and like so in order to get promoted and get more money more responsibility broader scope you don't need more people right so you can actually and those are like it's incredibly difficult if to do this because most systems aren't designed to do this right one things ask is what if you completely block yourself from considering number of people in the in a cre for crafters and once you do that you actually realize typ of things you care about like is management complicated sure but is leading like an open source project that affects the entire Ruby code base also complicated yes that's also complicated it's a different level of complication and in some ways it's just cheaper and easier hack to say well complication equals a number of people which is just totally wrong yeah I totally agree and you know I was talking to someone who was like a CPO at a company before and now he's just going back to being either like a IC or like a just like a um line level manager and he told me like what he really loves is just like going into a room and talking to engineers and like doing a whiteboard talking to customers and that that's kind of what I really love doing too and like as companies scale like internal Optics St becoming more important if you don't fight against it like you know like some examples is like you know people spend a ton of time on Executive presentations or like you know this kind of stuff so you guys prevent this stuff from happening at Shopify grow I mean it's already a big company yeah I mean part of our job with Shopify is to be a

company that rages against being a big company that's like literally part of our job to be a flat company built of Crafters rather than like discipline and I think what happens is a there's a percious like a exercise where especially for product managers where executive product reviews become kind of a show where it become Pixel Perfect and we just like thought of fight this one of the ways we fight this is by literally telling people to not spend their time by limiting the tools they can use presentations such that they're not like designed to be Pixel Perfect Right y that's one thing do second we actually jump into code very frequently in product reviews and Shopify we literally dump directly into code saying show me the code let's see how this would work and the way we actually build product with shopy is different than most companies where we build products in stages the first stage called proposal be like hey I want to propose a product to be built the second stage is prototype you actually have to prototype the thing and see how would work in code and then we do a review at prototype stage which changes like no one ever asks in a product review in Shopify well

what is this strategy for this that just tends to be the least meaningful part of whether it's a good product or not so actually like this idea that every um product manager should be like kind of an internal like a mck or BCG consultant a big company it's a bad idea like it's objectively wrong or you want you to be extremely user focused have a high degree of empathy for users take an insane amount of ownership over problems and then be risk maximizing machines right if you're not careful with if you not those three things and what PMS become is keepers of strategy quote unquote where you end up having if actually the worst of Both Worlds we end up having very smart people who are incredibly credential spending all their time writing strategy memos whose only job is to increase head count so they can write more strategy memos like instead of shipping products you ship career plans yes the job of Shopify is to build products our job isn't to build career ladders so we focus on our product reviews on what product was shipping rather than our strategy yeah you should be my therapist man this resonates so much to with me like I seeing a lot of like really good Optics PMS they have this like big Vision like this like threeyear strategy and then they just Shi to MVP and they never actually ship anything else that's it so it's like what did the customer actually get from your big Vision doc people misunderstand

hly people very broadly misunderstand how products are built like people who cosplay as product Builders assume good products are built by like a three or five year strategy documents that's not 100 built good products are built by tinkering by Perpetual tinkering at the edges of a thing that's how they're built and basically everything you ever use or love has been built that same way right and it's just I think people misunderstand the value what value creation is as product managers and as a guy who prides himself on being a product manager yeah how does Shopify like PMS or other roles stay in touch with the customer like is there a lot of like hurdles to jump through to even talk to a customer or anyone can just go off and talk to no pretty job talk to a customer you should talk to customers all the time in fact even better you should be a customer lots of shopi product managers have stores I have a store Toby has a store Harley has a store we have stores that we sell things on yeah so like it's not like a an uncommon thing and part of our job is to talk to customers all the time I talk to customers almost every day and one of the things we do that's also very helpful which I think more companies should do we have like everyone at Shopify can become a customer service rep for a little while and just answer questions of things that are just totally Fubar and that allows you to feel the pain it's also honestly helpful because like in many ways because we the type of customers we have like our job is to serve independent business owners like people who want to create a thing that doesn't exist and in many ways they're like us they're Builders just are Builders of different kinds we build software they build Brands and so they can kind of speak our language which is very helpful yeah they're basically all entrepreneurs I mean yeah right so it's very helpful it's also very helpful that Shopify is full of EX founders so it's a company building for Founders but built by Founders or people who at least are very founder like even people who are sh who AR Founders have a Founder mentality yeah I like I get a along a lot better of EX Founders at these large companies than like corporate types even though not a found myself yeah it's hard to imagine what shock five would look like if it was run by corporate tys honestly it probably actually probably would have never been built to be honest in the first place because no corporate type thought this would be a good business right yeah in fact every fiveyear strategy Dem more written about Shopify from when Shopify started even at IPO was like this is a pretty bad business like great cool thanks yeah that's interesting how do you guys uh you know like a lot of the other big tech companies really focus on the numbers right like you got hit some okr or something we're not okr company I

actually think there are lots of important things that can't be measured yeah and not everything that can be measured is important and we believe the problem is if you are too focused on making turning one into 1. 1 yeah you will just forgo like everything else that is good and that matters so yeah we're not driven company that's not how we think about product building we're a company of Crafters focus on tinkering and Perpetual feedback motions and we think the way we think about it our job is to answer the Fallen question you can build one of three things at Shopify you can build platforms you can build products and features or you can build experiments those are three things you can do and I don't like we could spend a bunch of our time trying to figure out what the right okr for like each of those things are yeah and what happens in lot of companies like half the meeting is taken up deciding if you can measure the right thing or we can just go build the right thing and I find a lot easier this is not thing that there isn't a role for measurement there's a large role for measurement and like making sure you're doing the right thing but it's not product building is not the same thing as like being a stock broker it just isn't it's they're just different jobs as a matter of like having taste and you kind of know when a product resonates with a customer or not right you kind of know you have a feeling yeah yeah you can't like unfortunately this

is why I think there's so few good product managers in the world it's not a thing that I can necessarily take teach like I can't teach taste I can't teach you to be the type of person that takes an extreme amount of ownership over every problem I can't really teach you to have empathy I can help you find- tuned those things obviously but my job is to pick the people who have those three things already yeah exactly like it's about people's core values I think like they want to yeah exactly cool that's awesome I I love that culture maybe I should uh should explore yeah that sounds awesome let's talk about the other cat the topic meetings so at the beginning of the year you had this operation called chaos monkeys M and just like canel over recurring meetings I'm just curious like how do you guys end up doing this was it during like winter break you're like this is like over a Christmas break like we had a conversation and then like we broke the code to do it literally happened over a Christmas break yeah like I think Toby and I were talking about how

it is terrible like what you want to do what you end up doing like no one literally no one said I want to grow up and sit in meetings all day long and no one came to Shopify to sit in meetings people came here to and help entrepreneurs succeed help Founders and it just so happens to like do really good work as a builder you need Focus time and meeting time are opposite things from each other if you need uninterrupted Focus time and if your entire day is peppered by half hour meetings here and there you just can't ever get going yeah um it's like imagine if van go had to paint while perpetually interrupted by someone every 20 minutes like it just so and the work we do is like honestly closer to that than it is having a widget Factory right just how work is much closer to like that so we think it's an important un interrupted time is like Precious and what we did was two things right we actually like V we just here are things where we like cancel all meetings one three people reinstated our no meeting Wednesday removed bunch of channels that we thought were unnecessary but the more important thing we did was we changed the default answer for a meeting from being yes to no so if someone sends you calendar invite your default answer is yes unless you're otherwise busy at shop five the answer is no unless you need to be in that meeting right so the default answer changed and this has like had immense input sha was incredibly more productive this year I think we've like deleted something like 322 hours of meetings that's like yeah 36 years worth of meetings and we've seen like the average time people spend in meetings is down like 33% the company's shipping 25% faster it's been meaningful change in Shopify yeah that sounds amazing so basically like is L also no fiveyear strategy behind this we didn't write a strategy doc we just wrote the code to do the chaos FY yeah I mean yeah I mean dude like no no startup r a fiveyear strategy like that that's just bull like how you how what how's going on in five years yeah the world's moving too fast for me to know what's happening five years from now like my job is to keep our merchants on the Leading Edge of Technology such that when you choose Shopify you're making the ideal choice that will always keep you Tech forward you'll never have to worry about being left behind because you invest in the wrong stack that's my job and in order to do that the company needs to be much more Nimble yes doesn't mean we don't do hard things we don't do things that take a lot of time we do those little things we just don't do have like you know a central planning committee whose job is to decide how many widgets we need 17 years from now that's great yeah that sounds great you talk about having craft time there's an argument to be made that like you know like people like you are like managing hundreds of people that maybe your job is just s in meetings and try to empower people all day like do you also value your personal C craft time or yeah yeah I have very

very few meetings on Wednesdays like I like today I have two and this is one of them so I have very like I have my own Craft Time like I build things still I work on products that's what I SP most of my time doing so and look I'm not like I'm a manager so I'm not knocking on managers management is important management is incredibly important it's just isn't the only thing that's important right y so do man to have meetings sure of course I have meetings all the time but what Mages need to do is recognize that the most important part of their job is to make sure Crafters don't have to spend all their time doing things that managers should do yes right yes like you worked in big tech companies but

most big tech companies they the largest problems they usually have is they run out of meeting rooms there's a Perpetual problem at Big tech companies is there aren't enough meeting rooms and doesn't matter how many meeting rooms there are there aren't enough of them and I think that's a sign that there's some you know some the emperor doesn't have that much clothing on yeah it's like you build like a five Highway and there's always cars or something yeah kind of encourage the behavior yeah do you guys have a strong writing culture or like some other best practice to not have they have much stronger writing culture than the average company does they have a much stronger sharing culture like shop like when we used to have offices you don't have offic anymore when you used to have offices there was posters all over the wall that said do things tell people it was like all over the place and Shopify core we have our own operating system for how we run a company uh it's called GS s we get done that's we our own software and part of it a core thing is written updates frequently like weekly written updates and that is much easier to do and much better to do much more easily consumed than like a daily huddle or like something like that make sense yeah it's like a lot of the decisions I've found can be just resolved through like async written and then if you go back and forth like 20 times you can figure it out then have a meeting sure I mean look this is literally true Peter like what you said actually is true an existence of a meeting is a sign of a failure of another process it just me like the back and forth you did async didn't work let's just have a meeting but like what you really should do is figure out why that back and forth didn't work and make it such that those back and forth work better in the future now you like also need to have meetings but like it's better if just that system works rather than like an exist of a meeting is almost always sign of a missing API just like what it is like the information you need to do to make that decision didn't exist so you to have a meeting to figure out what the answer was once you have the meeting the thing you really should do is go back and fix the API yeah almost need to run a retro of why does meeting even happen yeah how do you uh what if you work at a company that's not Shopify like how do you protect your craft half time like can you just say no to meetings or do you have I don't know I mean I can tell you I think it's

incredibly difficult at most companies because most companies are built for managers they just actually kind of tell by how buildings work if you're in a company usually top floors is reserved for managers usually like just usually how it works in most places like one of the things sh is actually unique is sh's orc chart is inverted they have an inverted sh chart so the lowest level of the orc chart is Toby all right and comp that's so like it goes up from Toby so we've been the company's been deliberate about servant leadership since it's like it's say founding so I think it's incredibly difficult man so like my advice to people who want to spend their time building and focusing on their craft rather than sitting in meetings is this if you're very good at your job and if you value your craft just goop. com careers okay got it all right I I'll definitely write that down I keep that in mind yeah cool okay just a few more questions let's like talk about the PRI review some more right you know like I'm just like a PM and I had this like big presentation to CEO and I found that like a lot of PMS they want to tell the story they like oh you know I thought about all this everything's going extremely well here's just like a status update for you it's like to me that's like a total waste of time you know yeah like what do you think from an exact perspective no I think like I think you should not have that meeting like I think it's a sassic meetings are very odd meetings yeah I think like David is among the world's best CEOs just it's very clear he is and I think Roblox also thinks about the world similarly in like as Shopify which like what is the more important thing and we're both on this journey of building software to get rid of if things a traditional company have basically done by management as much as possible yes because like once you give like a root access to your OS to like someone else you just like might as well be someone else so yeah I think there's a the real thing and I don't think by way I don't think shop is alone in this are there few of us I think Roblox is one of those companies that is trying very hard to build a new type of company that wasn't accidentally designed yes so we ask the question as why we ask why very frequently about the key tenants of a business that very few people would ask why about H this a real question we ask why about Gap accounting at one point and it turns like you should use Gap accounting because everyone else but like there are very few things about which that is not true we want to know why something happens so we don't Caro cult and we don't do something just because someone else does it is a very good reason not to do that thing like

yes this is like this is what happens at most companies right Peter most companies adopt industry best practices but industry best practices are frequently because they've been written down it means someone used to do them a long time ago so many people did that someone had time to write them down so by the time you read about it it's probably way out of date in fact the people who used to them probably no longer do them so if you always try to get to Industry pass back to what you actually are doing is slowing yourself down taking yourself back in time to something the people who used to no longer do and that's just like really terrible and that's basically what most companies are not founder let end up being right they end up being like run by a series of people who want to minimize their risk dust to always adopt industry best practices yeah I think the inertia as companies's grow is just to become like a I mean just become like a crappier place to work as you get bigger and bigger you really have to fight every day to keep the culture that you had before it's like yeah you have to Rage Against the Machine all the time the newslet is called the Creator economy right Shopify is like one of the main enablers how do you plan to support creators Beyond an e-commerce platform or like you know where are some big areas yeah I mean look so one of our jobs that shop f is not to be perpetually distracted like by like things so we try very hard to focus on this area we have picked right which is how can we help people reach for Independence building companies build specifically retail businesses now it just so happens that a very good way to monetize yourself as a Creator is by building a retail business right like Mr Beast is on Shopify for a reason right yeah like it's a real thing it's not like and like we have products in there we have like a product called collabs which lots of creators use we have u a set of tools that are very good for creators but I want to be what we're not going to do we're like our job isn't to do everything our job is to be the ideal piece of soft software you choose that guarantees that you have not made a mistake when you want to sell something to someone right now you can be a creator that does affiliate links cool we have a product for you can be a Creator wants to start your own brand you have a product for you but if you're a Creator who wants to create new content for VR you should use some other piece of software but when it comes time to sell something in VR you should use Shopify because we will be exceptional at that that's not a good answer because usually when you ask like company Executives do you have a solution for my problem the answer every company

executive always gives is yes of course I do I have a solution for every problem but we don't if your problem is this particular size problem that you want to sell something to someone we're perfect if it's not please go use someone else I think that's a great answer actually I mean like going back to the strategy part like if there's one thing about strategy like focus on one thing that's strategy so I think just focus on that make shop the most important thing is to keep exactly I don't know who which quote whose quote that is but yeah have no cool all right thanks so much man yeah I'll this up and I'll share with you yeah cheers